Beyond School

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“

–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.

But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past - those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” - attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)

Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian - the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”

Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries - the “facts” - that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)

Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,

. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.

At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

I shot back,

And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?

Then Chris wrote:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment - biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered - threatened? - to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:

A History Assignment I’d Like to See:

Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*

Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?

—

(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)

Image: Quite Puzzling by Cayusa

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I don’t discuss my years as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL, a.k.a. ESL) specialist much on these pages, mainly because there are no ESOL students at my high school. But the experience of being a second teacher in the content-area classroom when I wore this hat? That’s some good fodder for thinking beyond school-as-usual.

Any of you who have co-taught or team-taught know the mix of factors that can make it a nightmare or a paradise. Working with fellow history teacher Michael Harvey (now in Abu Dhabi) was a dream. I discuss this in the movie below, and students weigh in on why they liked it too.

I still miss having a second adult in my English and history classes today. ESL aside, it just creates possibilities for better teaching - primarily by giving students the experience of hearing two “expert” adults argue about literary, social, political, and other issues. Michael and I debated such things as Castro’s Cuban revolution, American imperialism during and after the Cold War, the merits of economic, political, and religious systems, etc, with sincere differences. We fenced about them in free-wheeling debates whenever one of us disagreed with the other. We told the students to decide whose arguments had the most merit.

Then we had scotch and nice long talks as best of friends outside of class.

The students loved it. It was learning the family dinner-table way, with two reasonably intelligent, informed adults discussing and debating world events. “Kids” with ears learn a lot that way about thinking and points of view.

So this 2005 ESOL-in-the-Mainstream co-teaching training video I made at Shanghai American School is a good example of team teaching that worked. It’s received good feedback over the years. And notably, it’s about teaching, not about technology. Disclaimer: The dreaded Five-Paragraph Essay rears its ugly head here, but remember - it’s in the context of teaching academic essay-writing and organization for 14-year-olds. I always unteach the 5PE once students have shown they’re ready for organic writing.

It’s my first-ever iMovie, by the way. And enjoy the goofy Baptist preacher look I was playing with back then. I’ve since re-embraced my freak-flag.

Note: I’ve added this to my Teaching Gallery page.

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An interesting issue: A student posts a reflective entry including YouTube video on a class history blog. The video creator is an anti-Semitic apologist for Germany in WW II. The student wrote two remarks that offended him. First,

Today, there are still some racists believing in anti-Semitism just like Hitler. We cannot say they are wrong but we need to be aware of resources they make. Don’t be brainwashed by them! We really should have our own thoughts towards Hitler.

And second,

A video clip that shows about a racist idea towards Hitler. It makes me sick. If you look at the comments, it’s so funny.

Two comments from the videomaker have popped up recently that sent a bit of a chill up my spine. The first came last week:

what the [expletive deleted] you, using my video just for an attack.

Since school is out and this blog is now an “artifact” anyway, I experimented a bit when I saw the comment. I wrote,

[note from the moderator: the above message would have been deleted for its language and lack of any substantive ideas, but since said author claims it’s “his” video, maybe the conversation can move in interesting directions. Mr. “[Name],” if you would limit your profanities, it would be appreciated.]

The author responded with this second comment today:

Alright, you know people have there limits but this is extremely unacceptable for this attack on me and my video.

So much for “interesting directions.” I made the blog post itself “private” after this one. The student had actually written a preface saying “Don’t read this until I fix it” anyway, so I don’t feel unjustified.

[Update: You know, the second comment is so ambiguous, maybe the guy is trying to admit he shouldn't have cursed. Also, his opinion is justified. The student was uncivil and ad hominem in the remarks above. It all goes back, for both of them, to clear and civil writing, in a way. Interesting.]

But to me, this clearly raises some interesting issues about classroom blogging. I’d really appreciate feedback to help make some policy decisions before school starts again next month. Here are the issues I see:

1. The student’s innocent embedding of a neo-Hitlerian video from YouTube created a “teachable moment” about information literacy, source evaluation, and the ubiquity of the Holocaust revisionist movement on the internet. How would you have dealt with it?

2. Ping-backs are enabled on the blog to foster that “real-world connectivity” we value so much as adult bloggers. The rationale is, if students are linking to other content-creators interested in similar subjects, those pings will show up on their Technorati accounts or elsewhere, and potentially invite them to join the conversation. But here’s an example of it getting uncomfortable. Would you disable pings to avoid disturbing possibilities like the one above, or use a different approach? What approach would that be?

3. Free speech issues and “teaching the controversy.” How would you deal with comments from people in the world with unpopular points of view on your classroom blogs?

4. Moderation. Any teacher who has actually done classroom blogging will tell you that moderating before publishing is an enormously time-consuming task. But to not moderate before publication invites incidents like this. So what’s the solution?

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Unknown News | Lies from the Bush-Cheney administration

• Partisan? Yes. But also supported by documentary evidence. Could be a resource for Animal Farm, etc. Squealer doesn’t only symbolize Stalinist distorters of the truth, after all.–Clay
  

Political News, Blogs, Humor featuring Republicans, Democrats, Independents and More

• For social studies and contemporary issues teachers looking for a site representing a wide spectrum of positions on US political issues. I can see students using Scenemaker to clip segments from the videos on this site for “quotes” in essays they write about contemporary political issues.Useful for teachers who find one-stop shopping for balancing viewpoints a hassle.
  –Clay
  

Nag Hammadi Library

• It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Nag Hammadi Library for an understanding of the many interpretations of Jesus and Christianity before the Roman Catholic Church–and Imperial Roman police–violently destroyed them. Many of these original Christian texts bear more resemblance to Buddhism than to contemporary Christian belief.

  This website has translations of the early Christian texts that were buried in the 4th Century CE to preserve them from the destruction of the first great book-burning in European history. Essential for religious studies, European history, and informed religious discourse today.

  From the website:

• The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen ancient codices containing over fifty texts, was discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. This immensely important discovery includes a large number of primary Gnostic scriptures — texts once thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define “orthodoxy” – scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth.

  The discovery and translation of the Nag Hammadi
  library, completed in the 1970’s, has provided impetus to a major re-evaluation of early Christian history and the nature of Gnosticism. Readers unfamiliar with this history may wish to review the brief Introduction to Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi Library provided here, as well as an excerpt from Elaine Pagels’ excellent popular introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts, The Gnostic Gospels.
  

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Sick of students embedding full-length videos on their blogs and calling that “active learning”?

Scenemaker is one answer to upping the bar for “video commentaries.”

Here’s an example from the middle of a YouTube clip I love about the joys of bachelorhood:

And here’s another about its follies:

I wonder how easy it is to create mashups of these? If anybody knows, I’d love to hear.

In any case, for media studies blogging, for social studies current events or politics foci, and, the more you think about it, for a million more possible units, the freedom to selectively quote moments from much longer videos, and write about and around them, sounds very engaging. I’d like to read student works along those lines: “Watch this” followed by “I showed it to you because” elaborations and insights from the students.

And just imagine them embedding a spoken, rather than written, analysis and reflection of such clips using Flixn.

I can’t wait to play more with classroom blogging next year. I learned a lot in my first six months of trying it in the English and history classroom, but am still a rookie. Summer is already opening up a nice, quiet space for six weeks of “think-alouds.”

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